Chapter 33 The Factory #3
I felt a hot bloom of shame at that. When my sister Lydia disgraced herself by running off with a man, I had thought no one could bring more shame on us—but at least she had not shown her legs.
I was scratching and kicking, but it was no good.
He soon had me strapped down to the table, barely able to move.
He gave me a cheeky grin and chucked my chin.
“How’s it feel to be the one on the table, love? Turnabout is fair play, you know.”
“I saved your life on my table.”
“Not saved. Reinvented. Prolonged. And, as you know, I rely on your serums and secretions to maintain it. Now be a good wife and give me my medicine. I am partial to the red, you know, and yours is particularly piquant.” He stepped back for a moment, regarding my struggling form.
“Now, let’s see…” he murmured, as coolly as a gentleman choosing how to carve a roast. “Your wedding gown will have sleeves, but there will be balls and parties, and you will open the dancing—no, an arm won’t do.
” He stepped down to the end of the table, seized my foot, and shoved my trouser leg as high as it would go.
He gave a fond chuckle when he saw the scar his teeth had left.
“Not to worry, dearest, I won’t leave a scar this time. ”
I let out a moan of shame. How could I have let it come to this? I had thought myself so careful, so attentive to everything Quindley and his ilk could teach. How was it that I had not seen how wrong I had been?
It was as though I were another woman at night. I had felt so free, out from under everyone’s eyes, doing my experiments, dressing how I chose, consorting with Georgiana. Well, I was not meant to be free.
“Yes,” he was saying, examining the bare expanse of my leg. “No inconvenient questions for the bride if I cut you there.”
“You think,” I gasped, “that after all this I will still marry you?”
“Hush,” he murmured. “I think you will do it as gladly as I bared my bones to you. Now hold still. I’ve no desire to drain you dry, dearest.” One of his hands gripped my leg just above the knee, holding it still.
The other flashed a silver blade, and a slash of pain opened on my thigh.
I fought to stay silent but only succeeded in making my whimper a sort of growl.
He patted me on the head, like a puppy. “Good girl. Not too long. Fear not.” I felt him line up the funnel below the wound and heard my blood begin to trickle down into the basin.
“I hope it doesn’t work,” I said through gritted teeth. “I hope it makes you as stupid as a turkey that drowns drinking rain.”
He looked at me in surprise. “Is that what you still think the red is for? Intelligence? Oh, Mary.” He shook his head.
“It is a good thing that I have taken charge of this endeavor. Your discovery of the serums was brilliant, but your own limitations have kept you from understanding their true potential.”
“What do you mean?”
“You still think that each color of serum has one clear, simple effect,” he said.
“You would like that, would you not? If each person you knew could be literally boiled down to one trait that you could label and put on the shelf? That is nonsense, of course. The effects of each serum are far more varied and subtle than you realize. Some people even produce different colors over time. Do not feel bad—I have had access to a far larger subject pool than you have.”
A much larger subject pool. All those poor girls. How blind I had been.
He patted me again. Then, as the blood from my wound slowed to a trickle, he seized my leg and squeezed it as though he were juicing a lemon. I fought back a scream.
“Now,” he said, close to my ear, “I do find that your own lovely scarlet serum is essential to maintaining my intellectual faculties. But the principal effect is something quite different. In general, it fills me with rage.”
“Rage?”
“Mmm. A delicious, hot anger that flows through my veins and warms me like mulled wine. Oh, it is wonderful—makes me feel like me again. Without the red I never could have shaken off the stupor that your friend’s rib threw over me.”
“You’re lying,” I gritted out. “My serum cannot possibly induce rage.”
He looked surprised. “But of course it does. How could it not? You are the angriest person I have ever met.” He chuckled. “Well, barring myself, perhaps. We are well matched, dearest.”
“I am not angry.”
“Your powers of denial are astonishing. But I assure you that you are. If you could see yourself—the way your jaw clenches when people talk over your piano playing; the tightness around your eyes when your father condescends to you about some matter of science that you are ten times more master of than he; the stiffness in your back when they call you plain, not even bothering to see if you’re in earshot. My God, you are angry all the time.”
For a moment I forgot the pain in my leg and my deadly predicament. His words rang in my ears.
You are angry all the time.
Pike was mad, and selfish, and dead into the bargain. Nothing he said about my character ought to matter at all.
So why did I feel as though he’d opened a window I’d never even realized was there?
My headaches. My shaking hands. The way my words deserted me and I had to fill the space with Quindley—not that it mattered much, for I was scarcely asked what I thought.
It does not matter that my mother never loved me. It does not matter that no one asks me to dance.
It does not matter that no one asks me anything at all.
It does not matter that the world is so vast and so interesting and so full of snails and stars and sodium and wonder and yet when I try to speak of it, even for a minute, I am the odd one.
All the things I told myself, every day, over and over, with the discipline of practicing scales at the piano. I did not even notice anymore. I did not see what that silent litany had been put in place to drown out. What my head ached and my hands shook to keep at bay.
I am angry all the time.
This was not the moment to consider that revelation, for Pike was examining my wound with an expert’s care, and then he took out a cloth and began bandaging it.
“I daresay you could give more,” he said, “but I am feeling rather more cautious after Siobhan’s misadventure tonight, so let us move on to the next step. ”
The next step?
He went to one of the large barrels against the back wall and drew off a glass of brilliant cyan liquid. I cried out. There were at least a dozen barrels, each as large as a beer keg. “Surely those are not—”
“Yes. Each a different color. They’re not full yet, but they soon will be.
I told you, my innovations have allowed me to far outstrip your paltry operation.
And I’ve an abundance of the blue.” He gave me a friendly wink.
“Since I’ve no use for it myself.” He poured the liquid into a little copper pan over a flame.
It began to hiss and bubble almost immediately.
Before I knew what was happening, he was loosening the straps that held me to the table.
I began to struggle, of course, and even managed to make it a few steps back toward the river—but the man I made is strong and fast, and his veins are flooded with my own anger, and before I had gone ten feet he caught me again and marched my struggling form back toward his apparatus.
“You see,” he said, his mouth pressed near my ear, “this is my greatest insight. It is true that the serums do not have the desired effects on living subjects—but I realized that it was merely a matter of certain tweaks to the formula and to the vehicle by which the dosage was administered.” The blue liquid in the pot was boiling now, billowing pale clouds the color of shadowed snow into the air.
Pike seized me by the back of the head and thrust my face into the steam.
I coughed and choked. I was far enough from the flames not to be burnt, but I’d taken in a great lungful of the blue fumes. I coughed again, which only made me breathe in more, for Pike still held my head in the cloud.
“If a living subject drinks it, he merely gets ill,” Pike said, not even out of breath. “If it is inhaled, however…”
The liquid was not burning in my chest anymore. Rather, it seemed to have a cooling effect—not merely on my poor lungs, lacerated with steam and river water, but on my whole enervated self.
Why struggle like this? It was obviously futile. Wasn’t that always my problem—trying too hard? Would it not be better… kinder… more restful to let someone else make the decisions for a while?
“It’s better, really,” Pike said. “From a business standpoint, I mean. Why will people want these serums? Not to dose themselves .”
Oh, God.
“A bit in a wife’s smelling salt bottle,” he said, “and marital harmony is restored. A bit of it sprinkled over the stove in a factory, and the workers will never revolt. Oh, the applications are endless. I daresay we shall soon be the richest couple in England, dearest.” He chuckled through the calm blue haze blanketing my mind. “And the most harmoniously married.”
No.
I sealed my mouth shut. No more breaths.
“Ah, ah.” He shook me a little. “Breathe deep, dearest. I shall need you sweet and biddable for our wedding tomorrow.”
I held my breath.
“Oh, for—” He sighed. “This is pointless. You have already breathed in more than enough of the blue. It will take hold of you soon enough. Do not make yourself faint in the meantime.”
That damp blue haze was, indeed, settling more heavily upon me.
It felt rather nice, actually, like lying down at the end of a long day.
Parts of me that had been tense and sore all my life were letting go.
Surely Pike was right. Surely I ought to just do what he said?
It would feel so good. And what choice did I have, really?
No.